Named as a must-see play in Taiwan, He is My Wife, He is My Mother (Shaonian jinchai nanmengmu 少年金釵男孟母) is director Katherine Hui-ling Chou’s imaginative 2009 adaptation of a 350-year-old short story about homosexuality, infused with lesbian and heterosexual undertones. Based on author Li Yu’s “Three Moves of the Male Mother Meng” the play travels from 1912 Fujian to the conservative society of 1950s Taiwan. A gender-subversive, morally challenging epic gay romance brews—can the genuine devotion between two men and a mother’s love for the child, transcending gender and bloodlines, change destiny?

Chou will focus her lecture on queer representations in the play—accompanied by principal actor Yi-Hsiu Lee, who will give a live demonstration of various aesthetic strategies deployed in the performance.

Yi-Hsiu Lee is CEO of the Performance Center at National Central University and the founder of La Cie MaxMind theatre group. His works integrate traditional and contemporary performance aesthetics to represent and embody the various cultural influences that shape Taiwanese identity. Aside from contemporary theatre, he has also been performing in such traditional xiqu styles as Kunqu, Liyuan opera, and Taiwanese Gezi opera,; he is trained in the Taiwanese musical style of Nanguan.

Director Katherine Hui-ling Chou is currently the director of the Performance Center at National Central University in Taiwan and a core member of the Taipei-based renowned modern theatre company Creative Society. Both a scholar in performance theories and a theatre practitioner, She is also the author of Performing China: Actresses, Visual Politics and Performance Culture, 1910s-1945 (in Chinese; Rye Field Publications, 2004). Chou is one of the rare breeds of artists whose work is supported by profound academic comprehension and rich practical experience alike.